Stream Of Consciousness: Hotel Peculiarities And Foot Sprain Update

It’s been 11 days since I last blogged. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I can’t say that the time has flown because it has passed in exactly the same rate as it always does, 1 second, 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day at a time.

And yet it has been 11 days since this blog last saw some activity. I want to thank those that have still come by – I’m grateful for that and hope you found something interesting and entertaining. Did you share anything? I still have a few posts left to write about Berlin so I will not say more about it here but rather leave it for those posts.

Part-way through the week that I was in Berlin, the Lufthansa cabin crew went on strike on Friday and Saturday. Because I left on Sunday I wasn’t affected…almost. It did cause chaos with cancelled flights and travellers routed via Istanbul and other exotic destinations. It was touch and go, though, that my Frankfurt-Joburg flight wasn’t cancelled. It was cancelled and reinstated within a 2 minute period. Was it a finger-error that SMS was sent, or did things really change within a 2 minute period? I prefer to err on the side of the finger-error. At that stage, all I wanted was to get home and any change to my scheduled flights would probably have resulted in a Regina-meltdown.

The hotel in Berlin didn’t have a laundry service even though they had a laundry bag in the room (!!!). The idea was to launder my jeans so that I could wear them again in Cape Town. But no such thing, and I wasn’t going to trawl through Berlin looking for a laundry. Not that I would have had time anyway as my days were full. In Joburg Che met me at the airport with clothes and we had some time for lunch in between repacking my suitcase.

Another peculiar thing of the hotel in Berlin was the lack of tea/coffee making facilities in the room. There wasn’t room service so the only way to get a cup of coffee or tea at night was to go out. Granted, vendors were close by and I would’ve only needed to walk a few metres to get a cup of coffee or tea. But just as I’m ready to go to bed, in my PJs…the last thing I wanted to do was go out to buy a cup. I also don’t know how my PJ fashion would’ve gone down with the Berliners out for some fun on a Saturday night. Only kidding, I would never go out in PJs, you have to believe me. In any event, after coming back from Cape Town I spent 2 nights in my own bed and I was off to a conference in the Magaliesberg. I’ve been home for 5 days now and I go Cape Town on Monday.

I’m not complaining – I love travelling – I just needed to find something to write about tonight to break the blog drought and this stream of consciousness is what emerged 🙂

Update on the foot sprain: while in Berlin it turned all sorts of shades of blue and black; all the walking I did there did it the world of good though. I massaged arnica oil twice a day. The combination of walking and arnica oil made the swelling go down and by the time I arrived back in South Africa my foot was back to its normal colour.

Note to self: I really must schedule posts so that there is at least one article every day!